OUT in the endless grey of the Atlantic Ocean, a vessel drifts alone. The only sound in the dining room is the wind. The only smell in the galley is rust. The cabins that once held 100 passengers lie empty; there’s not a soul aboard. Along the bow, a row of drip-stained letters spells its name: Lyubov Orlova.
The Orlova is a modern-day ghost ship. It disappeared on 4 February 2013, en route to the Dominican Republic, without power or crew. The loss triggered a global hunt involving coastguards hoping to find the ship before it ran ashore or struck an oil rig; the coordinators of a new satellite system with a point to prove; and even a team of would-be treasure seekers. Each had their own prize in mind: prevention of disaster, reputation and glory, or a salvage bounty worth a million dollars. How hard could it be?
In fact, it proved far from easy. This raises some important questions: in an age of global surveillance, when planes and satellites can watch our every move, how can we lose a 1400-tonne ocean liner? And what else might be roaming the high seas, abandoned and long forgotten?
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Named after a Soviet actress, the Lyubov Orlova was bolted together in Yugoslavia in 1976. In its heyday, it went on expeditions to the poles: while the vessel’s strengthened bow brushed aside broken ice, tourists snapped gleaming icebergs from the observation deck or sipped drinks in the lounge.
By January this year, however, the Orlova had fallen into a sorry state, derelict and impounded in the frozen harbour of St John’s in Newfoundland, Canada. The crew had dispersed, the power was gone and the only life onboard was vermin.
The government body responsible for the harbour – Transport Canada – wanted the vessel gone. They finally got their wish when the Orlova was sold and its new owner hired a tug to tow the vessel to the Dominican Republic, where scrap merchants would dismember it piece by piece. The Orlova’s time was up – or so it seemed.
After leaving port on 24 January, bad weather set in and the tow line parted. The Orlova began to drift dangerously close to oil fields, which prompted oil company Husky Energy to send a ship to intercept it and regain the tow. Successful, they handed the line back to a Transport Canada vessel. The Orlova’s fate at the breaker’s yard appeared sealed. Then the tow was lost again.
Or perhaps it was released deliberately – Transport Canada won’t comment. Whatever the truth, by early February, the Orlova was on its own in international waters (see map). Drifting, abandoned, it disappeared.
Around a week later, on the opposite side of the Atlantic, one man was about to discover he had a problem. On 11 February, Chris Reynolds, the director of the Irish Coastguard, was on the phone to a coastguard contact in Canada, trying to set up an interview with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield for Ireland’s national broadcaster. Towards the end of their conversation, the Canadian officer delivered a bombshell: “Oh, by the way, we’ve lost a ship.”
Reynolds knew what this meant: driven east on prevailing Atlantic currents, the vessel would bear down on Ireland. It could run aground, triggering a major clean up, or drift into shipping lanes or oil fields and put lives in danger. He needed to find that ship.
Reynolds had spent his life at sea but had never faced anything on this scale before. While plenty of abandoned boats, containers and debris are thought to float on the ocean, few rival the Orlova’s 100-metre-long hull. One of the largest in recent years was the Ryou-Un Maru, a 50-metre trawler that appeared off the US coast last year, . Within days, Reynolds and his team became coordinators of an ocean-wide search.
Speck on the sea
The Irish team soon realised the scale of their task. It’s usually easy to find ships – all large vessels are required by law to broadcast their position with a transponder called the . But the Orlova’s AIS was dead. Sightings were unlikely too – the ocean is too vast. Nor would satellite-mounted cameras help: though trained on the ocean, their resolution isn’t high enough to make out a ship without zooming in, and for that you need to know where to look. Besides, the north Atlantic is often cloudy. So Reynolds turned to specialised search and rescue software that he hoped would predict the Orlova’s location based on known currents and prevailing winds.
However, predicting the ship’s trajectory proved challenging. The software was programmed to find small objects such as jet skis or yachts, not a large vessel sitting high in the water that strong winds could blow around unpredictably. And with more than a week elapsed since the Orlova went missing, their search area was enormous.
Reynolds and his team weren’t the only ones looking. News of the Orlova had reached Pim de Rhoodes, captain of the Fourcault, based in Antwerp, Belgium. He and his adventure-hungry crew usually earned a living . But de Rhoodes realised that putting a line onto the Orlova in international waters could bring a windfall.
If they recovered it, they would either get a substantial return fee, or they could claim ownership and then sell to scrap merchants for up to €700,000. There was even talk of hawking the vessel’s furniture and fittings. Ghost-ship memorabilia promised to fetch a good price online: the ship had already inspired a , smartphone app and a . On 16 February, he and a volunteer crew set off into the Atlantic, hoping for a stroke of fortune.
For Reynolds, luck seemed in short supply – until a timely phone conversation. He was talking to Guy Thomas, a maritime surveillance consultant based in Baltimore, Maryland, who had asked him to speak at a conference. Reynolds explained that he would have to pull out. “We have a ship inbound on us,” he said. Thomas became excited. He had an idea; a project he had been working on for years. “If it’s still afloat,” he said, “I think we can find it for you.”
Invisible pirates
As a former US navy reconnaissance engineer, Thomas had watched the ocean for much of his career. However, he had grown frustrated by the fact that pirates, illegal trawlers and the like can remain almost invisible. He realised there was one type of sensor that could keep tabs on these vessels – it just wasn’t looking.
Satellite-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems are used to measure surface features like topography. To do this, they transmit a radio pulse over a broad area, then calculate the shape of the Earth’s surface based on the timing and type of signal scattered back. Unlike cameras, they can comb wide swathes of ocean with a resolution high enough to spot a ship – and the signal penetrates cloud. Thomas has already established a project called that brings SAR satellite operators and maritime authorities together. Now he needed to persuade them that it worked and finding the Orlova would be the perfect demonstration.
Thomas asked two satellite operators to donate time on their spacecraft: an SAR operator from Italy called and US company , which monitors AIS signals from orbit. The Irish team supplied their best-guess coordinates for the liner, and the satellites went to work.
As the first images came in, the Irish team ticked off radar blips from vessels with active AIS beacons, hoping to find a silent blip remaining. A few times they thought they had it… but then on the next satellite pass the blip would disappear. The Orlova wasn’t there.
Out on the ocean, de Rhoodes and his crew were struggling too. In the Atlantic winter, the waves were as daunting as mountains. Then, just a day from their search zone, one of their two engines failed. Reluctantly they limped back to Antwerp, resolving to sail again.
Meanwhile, rumours circulated. An article by Agence France Presse claimed a on 21 February; there was also talk of a sighting in a Caribbean port. None was confirmed.
Then came a twist. On 23 February, the Irish coastguard suddenly picked up a distress signal from one of the Orlova’s Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacons. These devices activate when a ship goes down, or when one of its lifeboats hits the water. Clearly this beacon’s battery had some power left and it gave them an exact position – towards the north-east edge of their search zone.
Almost everyone assumed that this was the Orlova’s last gasp: it must have sunk. The danger of collision or grounding was over and the satellites were called off.
Then, almost two weeks later, there was a surprise: another distress signal from a second beacon. This was mystifying. If the Orlova had sunk, how could this be? Perhaps it was shedding lifeboats. Or maybe the ship had capsized and was partially submerged. Whatever the cause, the signal couldn’t be ignored. The Irish search was back on.
“Then, almost two weeks later, there was a surprise: another distress signal from a second beacon”
But would the Belgians beat them to it? De Rhoodes was already closing in on this new location, thanks to an unlikely tip-off. One day, an Irish man in uniform turned up, claiming to know the Orlova’s position. When de Rhoodes checked with other sources, the coordinates seemed plausible, so they set out. Their destination turned out to be close to the second signal’s location.
By 22 March, de Rhoodes team had arrived and their helicopter was making sweeps of the area. The swell made take-off and landing dangerous, but it was worth the risk: they could scan 50-kilometre-wide strips of sea at a time. They saw a tanker and, in the distance, a passenger ship. “That’s it!” thought de Rhoodes. It wasn’t. The vessel’s captain answered their radio calls.
They saw five ships in all, none of them ghosts. Days later, as a last-ditch effort, de Rhoodes turned off his engines and let his ship drift to see where the currents might have taken the Orlova. Surprisingly, the winds accelerated them west. We aren’t going to find this ship, he thought. Then the weather worsened, so he headed for home.
Two blips good
By now, the Irish were ramping up their search effort. Reynolds asked the satellites to make another pass – and at last, success! They got two blips: one possibly a lifeboat, the other large enough to be a liner, moving dark and quiet up between Iceland and Scotland. It was time to launch the planes.
In early April, two planes took off, one to hunt each blip. The plan was to display live images to an audience at a in Dublin Castle. But the plane dispatched to the position of the smaller blip found nothing. If there had been a lifeboat, it had sunk. That left the second pilot, scouting the sea north-east of Ireland. Finally, it located a ship. Could it be the Orlova at last?
Looking back, Reynolds lets out an exasperated laugh. “It was a Spanish fishing vessel with all its transponders turned off,” he says, fishing where it shouldn’t be.
The Orlova had disappeared. Six months on, the ship still hasn’t turned up.
Disappointing? Certainly. Wild-goose chase? Reynolds thinks not. The events have highlighted that even in the 21st century, our knowledge of what occurs on the ocean is surprisingly poor. If it is so hard to find the Orlova, how can we hope to keep tabs on pirates or illegal fishing vessels?
It’s the wild west out there, says Reynolds. We are very good at recognising typical behaviour, vessels behaving themselves, he says. “But our systems don’t allow us to see people who don’t want to be seen.” We need better policing, he argues, if we are going to exploit wind and tide energy at sea, prevent illegal fishing, mine resources safely and ensure safe passage. “Everybody talks about using maritime surveillance to find the bad guys,” says Reynolds. “For me it’s about allowing the good guys to do good things.”
Radar satellite technology isn’t perfect, but as the hunt for the Orlova shows, it can easily spot small vessels – if used in the right way. “We could build a maritime surveillance system today,” says Thomas.
So is the Orlova on the seabed? There are tantalising reasons to believe otherwise. For starters, the ship had been made extra-buoyant for its final voyage, meaning it would have been able to stay afloat in heavy weather. It also had six lifeboats, each with a distress beacon. If they had all hit the water, why were only two signals picked up? “I think it could float for years,” says de Rhoodes. “If I have a location, I’ll go for it, no problem.”
It is certainly not unprecedented for a ship or other large object to be lost for long periods. In 2012, a 20-metre-long Japanese floating dock – one of three lost in the tsunami 15 months earlier. Since 2000, at least seven ghost ships have been found wandering the seas, from a rusted, 80-metre-long tanker off Australia with no known owner to an empty yacht found near Sardinia with half-eaten meals on-board. And an estimated – around a third of which float.
However the record probably belongs to a Swedish steamer called the Baychimo. Abandoned in pack ice in 1931, it was seen drifting at various points along the Alaskan coast for more than 30 years. It was last sighted in 1969; a search by the Alaskan government in 2006 turned up nothing. Perhaps the Orlova faces a similar fate? Somewhere out on the grey, the liner may still drift, silent but for the slap of waves on metal, and forever lost.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Missing!”
